E-Commerce Website Customer Engagement and Retention Strategies

The internet has opened up a vast new arena in which businesses can operate, increasing the potential to connect with prospective customers, increase brand awareness, and ultimately, make sales. And whether you’re looking to expand your business or not, you almost have to have an online presence if you want to remain competitive these days. However, it’s important that you realize just how much you stand to gain by putting the time and effort into understanding what operating in virtual space can offer you when you implement targeted strategies. And one of the best ways to make your business successful online is by finding ways to engage customers and retain their business. It’s not enough to launch your website and set up social media profiles. Your efforts must be creative, entertaining, and most importantly, ongoing.

There are several strategies you can employ in order to engage customers. First and foremost, you need to provide places for them to find you. Since you probably already have a website, this means setting up a satellite of communications options, namely via social networking platforms. You can spread your tendrils a lot further when you have the ability to directly contact your followers anywhere and at any time thanks to alerts on their smartphones and tablets via social media. But when you set up a means of interacting with prospective customers, you absolutely cannot fail to man the controls. If your customers reach out and you leave them hanging, they’re probably not going to give you another chance. They’ll just move along to your competition. So think about hiring a community manager if you simply don’t have to time keep the wheels spinning on your social media profiles.

In terms of communications, you should also set up ways for your customers to contact you via your website with any questions or concerns they may have. Setting up a customer service email and phone number is the first step, but you might also want to provide a live chat option so that consumers can get the immediate answers they crave from a live operator who is knowledgeable and polite. You should also train your customer service representatives to go the extra mile to ensure that consumers have the incredible experience that inspires loyalty to your brand and spawns recommendations to family and friends as a trusted source. When you treat your customers right and go above and beyond to make sure they’re satisfied, the result is the kind of loyalty that you just can’t buy.

Of course, engaging customers requires more than simply setting up a website, using directory software, and providing avenues for consumers to reach out to you. You need to find ways to spark conversation and keep it going if customer retention is also your goal. And while you can certainly follow what’s trending and launch campaigns intended to inform and entertain, you also need to use metrics to track how consumers are interacting with you. When you gather data related to how your content is being used, shared, and liked, just for example, you have the ability to analyze the information in order to better tailor your efforts to the preferences of your customers, allowing for better engagement and retention over time.